"Are There Places Anymore?": Performing the Indian Subcontinent in Britain

"Are There Places Anymore?" Performing the Indian Subcontinent in Britain1 NANDI BHATIA IT/he meaning 1 ../ o/place lias given this century its politics; / .. ./ it hasafso given it its theater. Chaudhuri 3 (emphasis in original) In an age when deterritorialization is seen as the dominant condition of a glo~ bally interconnected world, the complex cultural relationships of post-colonial migrants to their homelands - both those they left behind and the ones they currently inhabit - remain a matter of much critical discussion. As Vijay Mishra has argued with regard to the Indian diaspora, for those faced with traumas of displacement, racial hostilities, and memories of personal, material , and emotional loss, the homeland they leave behind becomes a haven for recuperating this loss. Connected though it is to a geographical place, this homeland's physical inaccessibility results in its imaginative construction through a fantasy that is linked "to that recollected moment when diasporic subjects feel they were wrenched from their mother(father)land" (Mishra, "The Diasporic Imaginary" 423). For those who have remained in touch with the subcontinent through family networks, marriage, electronic bulletin boards, Bollywood, music, and so forth, the homeland becomes a place "that is always present visibly and aurally (through video cassenes, films, tapes and CDs)" and is incorporated into their "bordered deterritorialized experiences within Western nation states" (434). Yet, despite these points of connection, the narrative of homeland is still mediated by distance, memory, and some schismatic break. This break may be the result of the cartographic practices of empire: the remapping of the subcontinent at the time of independence in 1947 partitioned it into the nations of India and Pakistan, causing permanent dislocation of millions from their original homes and relocation to new homelands , which for some included the ex-imperial metropole of Britain. Remembered from the space of distance, the homeland then makes its appearance Model'll Droma, 46:4 (Winter 2003) 629 NANDI BHATIA through numerous cultural fragments: languages, customs, cuisines, clothes, even soil, which as Liisa Malkki points out, "is not uncommon for a person going into exile to take along I.... )from his or her country" (55). While giving rise to new "hybrid cultures of postcbloniality" (Gupta and Ferguson 35), such shards of memory enable communities to reinvent claims on places they no longer inhabit. In Britain, a colonial past, its attendant dislocations, and the increasingly racialized politics and policies since the 19505 when immigration from the subcontinent increased, make such claims on places become even more meaningful. While allowing communities to negotiate their lives in a racially fraught climate, they challenge assumptions that the home where they reside is homogenous; they rupture its social and political landscape in ways that render visible what Gupta and Ferguson identify as the hierarchical interconnections between places, cultures, and nations - in this case the cultures of Britain and the Indian subcontinent. Such preoccupation with the homeland has remained central to Asian drama since the 1970s, a period that saw its emergence as a political practice that proposes a scrutiny of Britain from the margins, and examines the consequences of past and present imperial policies for immigrants whose increasing presence in Britain has altered the nation's human geography. In Ihe space of the theatre, its recovery takes place through memories of specific historical moments of the colonial encounter, of the physical landscape through literal descriptions of the land and its relationship to communities, through the introduction of languages , speech patterns, and local flavours, and through snapshots of Bollywood . Such recovery transfonns the formalistic and thematic aspects of theatre to produce a hybrid and multicultural aesthetic whose function is to deprivilege imperial spaces, foreground unequal relations of power between empire and colony and among the cultures of post-colonial Britain, and expose social and political processes that make meaningful the imagined recovery of "home" and its identity. The performance that such an aesthetic allows, then, not only enables negotiation of the sense of loss for the place left behind but also makes an important intervention both in a post-colonial politics of race-relations and a theatrical practice that continues to centralize white Britain. This paper explores Harwant Singh Bains's Blood (1989) and Hanif Kureishi 's...